About Me

My photo
I would say i place more emphasis on how people react and engage with my work as opposed to a final finished piece. I like to use my work as a ‘catalyst for conversation’ setting up situations where people are faced with socialising and communicating. Whether that is a Tea Party, Gardening Club, or sewing workshop, i find appropriating social forms keeps your hands busy, relaxes your mind, keeps anxieties at bay, and naturally progresses towards conversation. The nature of my work activates the viewer, hopefully engaging them. Providing me with a participant to work alongside, and making us into a a collaborative team. The realisation of this means that i can never predict the outcome of the work, and also makes it very susceptible to change on an hourly basis due to the involvement of others. As a creator of these 'situations' it can be exhilarating, exhausting, nerve-wracking, and stressful, but the buzz and atmosphere created is a just reward for the roller-coaster of emotions each piece produces.

Sowing Seeds

Sowing Seeds has been my first piece of collaborative work. Together alongside Duncan Wilson (BA Fine Art) we decided to work alongside College Road primary school and focus on these key points:
  • To involve primary school children in nature by running their own garden.
  • Emphasize the importance of the social bond through encouraging social interaction between children and their parents/grandparents, and College Road Primary with the University of Plymouth. 
  • Taking art out into the community to initiate social change.
  • Actively engage the children in creativity by designing the garden and recording in their artist books the workshops they have been taking part in.
  • To show the complete cycle of sowing seeds, harvesting plants, how to cook them in a healthy way and saving seeds to repeat the cycle again.
  • Emphasizing the need to include fruit and vegetables in your diet.
  • Using recycled materials where possible.
  • A sustainable project that can be replicated for any school to follow.
The collaborative element within this project has this time not just been myself and the audience members involved, but also myself and Duncan, something that is new to me. It makes me smile at the vast physical differences between the two of us, yet for the most part, us as perhaps an unlikely duo have complimented each others ideas with our own and I would say have been a collaborative pair as opposed to a cooperative pair just bumbling along side each other.

Although Duncan and I set off with similar ideas to create a piece that was based very much around active spectatorship, and memory, I would say we came to that point from different directions. For me the pieces I put on are about shaping both the artwork and the experience you have of it on a personal level therefore helping it to become tailored to each individual and leaving one with the gift of a lasting memorable experience. My understanding of how Duncan creates his work is that it is about remembering experiences that have previously happened and using his fathers shed as a tool to evoke feelings that derive from those memories.
Although not a concrete concept, I wonder about whether our difference of attitudes towards putting on work evolves from the difference in our ages. At 21 I am starting my life and creating memories I will carry with me into the future, Duncan at 63 has had a wealth more experience than myself and so he is fortunate enough to be looking back, treasuring memories already made

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